Why Christmas Should Be on January 25

(Newser)
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Face it: Nobody likes the end of the year. You spend a ton of money on gifts and travel, plus you have to shove so many Christmas activities into the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you barely get to enjoy any of them. Which is why, on Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan offers up a proposal: Let's move Christmas to January 25. She has an appropriately Christmas-themed 12 reasons why. Among them: more time for holiday parties (and thus more time for your liver to recover in between holiday parties), more time to see your family, more time to relax and drink hot cocoa and watch the Yule Log and Christmas-themed TV, more time to decorate, and a better chance of actually having snow on Christmas.

Plus, there's the fact that no one actually knows Jesus was born on December 25 anyway. "The Romans considered celebrating Christmas on March 21st. Some early Christians celebrated it on January 6th. They eventually settled on shortly post-winter solstice because pagans were already celebrating around that time, and it's easier to co-opt a holiday that already exists than it is to create a new one. Everyone knows that. Christmas is just Saturnalia appropriation. The date is move-able," Ryan writes, and it's particularly move-able if you're not religious to begin with. Last but not least, "January sucks," she writes. "Imagine if at the end of January, there was relief in the form of Christmas. Chestnuts/open fires. Ice skating. ABC Family made-for-TV movies." Click for her full column. (Read more Christmas stories.)